I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
Blog: aaronbergman.net
A monitor will only benefit you if you act on its readings by a) buying a purifier, b) avoiding areas with pollution. If you install the monitor at home you don’t really have the option to avoid it so a) is the only viable path to impact I see.
Eh it’s gonna depend on the particulars of each living situation but I think there are a bunch of dials/levers the monitor can cause you to adjust:
Usual/common
Central air (is that the right term?):
temperature
speed (including off/on)
which vents are open
Windows
Doors open/closed/cracked
Fans (potentially even a cheap USB-powered one)
speed
direction
Air purifier (+quantity/price/quality/speed/noise)
(De)humidifier (idk if these have an affect on air quality but plausible)
Which room you work in (ik not everyone has this or other choices on the list)
Plants (I think the effect size is usually too small but not certain)
Potentially also:
Moving (residences/cities)
When you work/move/go elsewhere
e.g., going to the library if C02 hits 1000 ppm when roommate is having friends over
Wearing a mask (at least potentially idk)
Which cleaning/scent products you buy and use
Which appliances you buy (like electric vs gas stove)
More important than “tweak each dial 2%” though, is that I think during some small but non-trivial proportion of user-hours (5-10%?), the user would discover that their working environment is bad enough to warrant a more dramatic change than “crack a window and turn on a fan,” which they wouldn’t make without direct immediate feedback from a monitor. I’m not certain though of course, and certainly could be wrong about this!
I don’t want to make too strong a claim here; my current guess is basically “C02 doesn’t (at normalish levels) decrease intelligence per se; it makes you tired and lazy” (so playing a fun and low executive function game less affected perhaps?) On the other hand I recently learned that it’s anxiogenic, which intuitively points in the opposite direction of arousal so I really don’t know...
On the other other hand, compare air quality at large to, say, “temperature while studying,” where the outcome variable measured is final grade. Would I really get worse grades if it was always 75° instead of 65°? I’m not sure, but even null result RCT for air conditioning affect on academic performance or math problems completed in a minute wouldn’t convince me that temperature has no causal effect on cognition-intensive tasks; ceteris paribus is ~impossible to achieve!
Last week I complained about not being able to see all the top shortform posts in one list. Thanks to Lorenzo for pointing me to the next best option:
...the closest I found is https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts?sortedBy=topAdjusted&timeframe=yearly&filter=all, you can see the inflation-adjusted top posts and shortforms by year.
It wasn’t too hard to put together a text doc with (at least some of each of) all 1470ish shortform posts, which you can view or download here.
Pros: (practically) infinite scroll of insight porn
Cons:
longer posts get cut off at about 300 words
Each post is an ugly block of text
No links to the original post [see doc for more]
Various other disclaimers/notes at the top of the document
I was starting to feel like the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie’s eternally-doomed protagonist (it’ll look presentable if I just do this one more thing), so I’m cutting myself off here to see whether it might be worth me (or someone else) making it better.
I do think this could be an MVP (minimal viable product) for a much nicer-looking and readable document, such as:
“this but without the posts cut off and with spacing figured out”
“nice-looking searchable pdf with original media and formatting”
“WWOTF-level-production book and audiobook”
Any of those ^ three options but only for the top 10/100/n posts
So by all means, copy and paste and turn it into something better!
Oh yeah and, if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend going through the top Shortform posts for each of the last four years here
Late but thanks on both, and commented there!
For Shortform:
The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
I can imagine it being near/stylistically like:
“All Posts” (top of sidebar)
“Recommendations” in the center
“Frontpage Posts”, but to the main section’s side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
I’d really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can’t easily do that atm
Infinitely easier said than done, of course, but some Shortform feedback/requests
The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
I can imagine it being near/stylistically like:
“All Posts” (top of sidebar)
“Recommendations” in the center
“Frontpage Posts”, but to the main section’s side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
I’d really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can’t easily do that atm.
So the EA Forum has, like, an ancestor? Is this common knowledge? Lol
Felicifia: not functional anymore but still available to view. Learned about thanks to a Tweet from Jacy
From Felicifia Is No Longer Accepting New Users:
Update: threw together
some data with authors, post title names, date, and number of replies (and messed one section up so some rows are missing links)
A rather long PDF with the posts and replies together (for quick keyword searching), with decent but not great formatting
Ok so things that get posted in the Shortform tab also appear in your (my) shortform post , which can be edited to not have the title “___′s shortform” and also has a real post body that is empty by default but you can just put stuff in.
There’s also the usual “frontpage” checkbox, so I assume an individual’s own shortform page can appear alongside normal posts(?).
The link is: [Draft] Used to be called “Aaron Bergman’s shortform” (or smth)
I assume only I can see this but gonna log out and check
Youtube (w/ accurate subtitles, embedded below)
RSS feed url: https://www.spreaker.com/show/5706170/episodes/feed
Drive folder with some scripts and other resources; may add more later!
(Will try to clean the thumbnail of my name and Spreaker logo, but don’t want to wait to share! )
...
Not certain and might take a couple days, but should be pretty easy (though not instantaneous) to basically make readouts in any English accent the new IOS can handle (‘British full version.m4a’ in the Drive folder is a sample, but has pronunciation issues due to weird text encoding)
Update: provisional text to speech audio (Siri reading that text file haha) now linked the top of the post!
Should be up on all the main podcast apps soon, but until then, you can listen on Spreaker at https://bit.ly/3UmQS85
I’m working on getting this to be read in a high quality voice, but for anyone else who wants to try/do it better, here’s a txt with what I think the voice should actually read (like no reading out page numbers and stuff like that): https://drive.google.com/file/d/155pb6tMkE-rSmrizi1jbzPKTMSmYJRDX/view?usp=drivesdk
Not 100% certain it’s correct though, likely a missing word or two
I’ll just throw out the possibility of copy and pasting the whole thing (with anywhere from zero to a lot of formatting/editing) into an EA Forum post, which (I assume?) would trigger the Nonlinear Library system to turn it into audio. This would also get it into the feeds of people who only consume the forum via podcast app.
Not able to write a real post about this atm, though I think it deserves one.
MacAskill makes a similar point in WWOTF, but IMO the best and most decision-relevant quote comes from his second appearance on the 80k podcast:
There are possible views in which you should give more weight to suffering...I think we should take that into account too, but then what happens? You end up with kind of a mix between the two, supposing you were 50⁄50 between classical utilitarian view and just strict negative utilitarian view. Then I think on the natural way of making the comparison between the two views, you give suffering twice as much weight as you otherwise would.
I don’t think the second bolded sentence follows in any objective or natural manner from the first. Rather, this reasoning takes a distinctly total utilitarian meta-level perspective, summing the various signs of utility and then implicitly considering them under total utilitarianism.
Even granting that the mora arithmetic is appropriate and correct, it’s not at all clear what to do once the 2:1 accounting is complete. MacAskill’s suffering-focused twin might have reasoned instead that
Negative and total utilitarianism are both 50% likely to be true, so we must give twice the normal amount of weight to happiness. However, since any sufficiently severe suffering morally outweighs any amount of happiness, the moral outlook on a world with twice as much wellbeing is the same as before
A better proxy for genuine neutrality (and the best one I can think of) might be to simulate bargaining over real-world outcomes from each perspective, which would probably result in at least some proportion of one’s resources being deployed as though negative utilitarianism were true (perhaps exactly 50%, though I haven’t given this enough thought to make the claim outright).
Person A can nominate Person B and have the card sent to her own (person A’s) address to then give it in person to person B. The website is super clear that this is allowed, all on honor system. I didn’t emphasize this to minimize how sus the whole thing sounded, but I am happy to act as conduit for anyone’s donation this way, or mail the card, or something else. Anyone can reach out if interested!
Contextual note: this post is essentially a null result. It seemed inappropriate both as a top-level post and as an abandoned Google Doc, so I’ve decided to put out the key bits (i.e., everything below) as Shortform. Feel free to comment/message me if you think that was the wrong call!
On his recent appearance on the 80,000 Hours Podcast, Will MacAskill noted that Doing Good Better was significantly influenced by the book’s publisher:[1]
Rob Wiblin: …But in 2014 you wrote Doing Good Better, and that somewhat soft pedals longtermism when you’re introducing effective altruism. So it seems like it was quite a long time before you got fully bought in.
Will MacAskill: Yeah. I should say for 2014, writing Doing Good Better, in some sense, the most accurate book that was fully representing my and colleagues’ EA thought would’ve been broader than the particular focus. And especially for my first book, there was a lot of equivalent of trade — like agreement with the publishers about what gets included. I also wanted to include a lot more on animal issues, but the publishers really didn’t like that, actually. Their thought was you just don’t want to make it too weird.
Rob Wiblin: I see, OK. They want to sell books and they were like, “Keep it fairly mainstream.”
Will MacAskill: Exactly...
I thought it was important to know whether the same was true with respect to What We Owe the Future, so I reached out to Will’s team and received the following response from one of his colleagues [emphasis mine]:
Hi Aaron, thanks for sending these questions and considering to make this info publicly available.
However, in contrast to what one might perhaps reasonably expect given what Will said about Doing Good Better, I think there is actually very little of interest that can be said on this topic regarding WWOTF. In particular:
I’m not aware of any material that was cut, or any other significant changes to the content of the book that were made significantly because of the publisher’s input. (At least since I joined Forethought in mid-2021; it’s possible there was some of this at earlier stages of the project, though I doubt it.) To be clear: The UK publisher’s editor read multiple drafts of the book and provided helpful comments, but Will generally changed things in response to these comments if and only if he was actually convinced by them.
(There are things other than the book’s content where the publisher exerted more influence – for instance, the publishers asked us for input on the book’s cover but made clear that the cover is ultimately their decision. Similarly, the publisher set the price of the book, and this is not something we were involved in at all.)
As Will talks about in more detail here, the book’s content would have been different in some ways if it had been written for a different audience – e.g., people already engaged in the EA community as opposed to the general public. But this was done by Will’s own choice/design rather than because of publisher intervention. And to be clear, I think this influenced the content in mundane and standard ways that are present in ~all communication efforts – understanding what your audience is, aiming to meet them where they are and delivering your messages in way that is accessible to them (rather than e.g. using overly technical language the audience might not be familiar with).
One thing I intuitively think could help a ton is an opt-out-only “First Post” (and also maybe “Second Post” and “Third Post”) tag placed on such posts.
I think it’s both good and true that Forum users would/do shift their qualitative feedback and voting in a more charitable direction if and when they knew that a particular post was a user’s first. But it currently takes a couple clicks to discern this information which I assume most people don’t actually go through upon reading every post by an author they don’t recognize. Of course charitable voting/commenting could go too far, but that seems like a fixable problem
To share a bit of my motivation for this idea, here’s my comment on “Your first posts will be cringe. It’s fine.” :
Literally true for me, down to the physical motion of cringing (maybe more like a grimace lol), a minute ago when I stared into the abyss.
Thanks to the 13 people who gave it a like to spare me some trauma at the time, though; in all seriousness, if it had gotten 3 karma instead of 20 I don’t think I would have tried again
Oh man that is not a pretty graph…
Same data, better resolution (and feel free to move this to the main post Vaidehi or Amber)
Thank you—fixed!